Senior Associate, Product Owner

Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per week 

Location:  This role can be filled in New York City, NY, Dallas, TX or Cleveland, OH.  

Role Overview:
New York Life is hiring a Product Owner (PO) role to join the Core Modernization program for Policy Administration for Life Insurance (PALI). The Core Modernization effort is installing a new Policy Administration system. PALI is a multi-year effort to migrate all newly written agent business to the new platform. The program is an enabler for future growth and our ability to reduce friction in the service of our agents and clients.

What You’ll Do:  
The Product Owner is tasked with prioritizing the epics and creating stories for their respective agile scrum team to initially, bring retail life products and minimum viable experiences to market on the new platform and then scale and deliver industry-leading components and service experience in the future. This individual will work closely with the Product Manager, the assigned Scrum Master, Business Analyst, and developers to achieve success. This role will be responsible for prioritizing the work of the scrum team, ensuring user stories are well defined and understood; that acceptance criteria is thought-out and represent the scope of the story and provides incremental value for the customer. The Product Owner is accountable for maintaining and prioritizing the backlog, conducting user acceptance tests (UAT), and accepting work that meets the desired outcome for the business stakeholders and/or customer.

Specific Responsibilities include:

• Responsible for defining and prioritizing the team backlog, which includes user stories, defects, and enablers. They ensure that the backlog is aligned with the program's feature map.
• Actively participates in Program Increment (PI) planning sessions.  Responsible for refinement of epics prior to the PI to forester commitments.  Advising the scrum team of priorities and business capability. Participates in various agile team events, such as daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and demos. They provide input, answer questions, and help the team stay focused on delivering value.
• Primary responsibility for refining larger initiatives. Ensure user stories are built with clear user value and thorough acceptance criteria.  Supports the scrum team with clarifying business expectations.
• Conducts user acceptance tests, accepts work and confirms team delivers the expected outcomes /value.  Demo accepted stories to full program each sprint.  
• Keeps pulse on the customers, anticipates bottlenecks, makes tradeoffs, and takes acceptable risks to maximize the benefit for our customers and business.  
• Establish and maintain relationships outside the Core Modernization team especially shared service teams in adjacent value streams. Manages dependencies with other teams and POs.  Provide clarity on requirements to gain cross-tech commitments, help resolve any blockers that may impact the team's ability to deliver.
• Engage with various stakeholders to seek clarity and validate business requirements/acceptance criteria.  
• Understanding of the NYL technical ecosystem, ability to work cross value streams
• Ability to mentor technical scrum teams, enforcing the architectural standards set by technical leadership, ensuring APIs support both strategic business goals and technical excellence. Understanding mapping of data fields, schemas, and relationships between internal and external systems to ensure accuracy, interoperability, and scalability
• Data Integration Stewardship – Product Owner that will represent the core modernization admin system, cross-functional efforts to map, standardize, and integrate data across systems, ensuring accuracy, interoperability, and secure information flow that supports business objectives.

What You’ll Bring:

• Strong prioritization skills: You can separate what must be done now versus what can be improved later.
• Comfort with smart risk-taking: You’re willing to make informed, thoughtful decisions that balance opportunity and risk to drive innovation.
• A minimum of 5+ years of progressive experience in providing business analysis in individual life, annuity, and health or property and casualty insurance, financial services, technology delivery, or other related fields.
• Must excel in team-oriented roles that rely on ability to collaborate with others.
• Bachelor’s degree Information Technology or a related field.  
• 3+ years’ experience in scaled Agile delivery preferred.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with an ability to communicate with a wide range of team members and job functions-all the way up to executives

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Pay Transparency

Salary Range: $80,000-$135,000 

Overtime eligible: Exempt 

Discretionary bonus eligible: Yes 

Sales bonus eligible: No 

Actual base salary will be determined based on several factors but not limited to individual’s experience, skills, qualifications, and job location. Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program.

Our Benefits

We provide a full package of benefits for employees – and have unique offerings for a modern workforce, including leave programs, adoption assistance, and student loan repayment programs. Based on feedback from our employees, we continue to refine and add benefits to our offering, so that you can flourish both inside and outside of work. Click here to discover more about our comprehensive benefit options or visit our NYL Benefits Site.

Our Commitment to Inclusion
At New York Life, fostering an inclusive workplace is fundamental to who we are and how we serve our communities. We have a longstanding commitment to creating an environment where individuals can contribute their best and succeed together. This foundation is rooted in our core values of humanity and integrity, ensuring that every employee feels valued and supported. By embracing a broad range of perspectives and experiences, we achieve greater success and fulfill our promise of providing financial security and peace of mind to families across all communities. Click here to learn more about New York Life’s leadership in this space.​

Recognized as one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and volunteerism, supported by the Foundation. We're proud that due to our mutuality, we operate in the best interests of our policy owners. To learn more about career opportunities at New York Life, please visit the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com.

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Job Requisition ID: 92601